For my money, Lewis Klahr is one of the finest collage animators working today. His meticulous choices of imagery, music, materials, and textures create dense, multilayered films that lure you in with inviting colors and sounds before you realize you\u2019re not in Kansas anymore. There is rarely a stable narrative to hold on to. You navigate Klahr\u2019s dream worlds on your own, following one strand until it vanishes beneath something altogether new.<\/p>\n
His latest feature-length work, Fable by the Door<\/em> (2026), brings together ten collage films made between 2022 and 2026. It is Part 1 of Klahr\u2019s larger From 45 to 33<\/em> project, although it is actually the second part to be completed. Part 2, The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness<\/em> (2022), appeared four years earlier. Fable by the Door<\/em> premiered at Los Angeles Filmforum on September 13, 2026, with Klahr in attendance.<\/p>\n The title offers a clue to how the feature should be approached. The numbers refer to the playback speeds of analog records: the 45 rpm single and 33 rpm long-playing record.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cThis title I thought up way back in 1983,\u201d says Klahr, \u201cand I was going to use it as part of the title of my Super 8 collage film series Picture Books for Adults<\/em> (1983\u201385), until I changed my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n More than four decades later, the title finally found a home. The fact that Part 2 arrived first is less complicated than it sounds.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I created Part 2, The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness<\/em>, I didn\u2019t know I was making a series!\u201d Klahr says. \u201cOnly after I\u2019d screened The Blue Rose<\/em> publicly did it occur to me that it was a section of a much longer series.\u201d<\/p>\n Klahr describes the project as a \u201cmedia autobiography,\u201d although he is quick to distinguish that from memoir.<\/p>\n \u201cIt sounds like a memoir, doesn\u2019t it? But it\u2019s not personally descriptive in that sense. It is instead a personalized repurposing of my diverse and voluminous source materials into a cinematic collage that explores \u2018the pastness of the present.\u2019 Just like the first completed section, The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness<\/em>, this new series is a cinema of shifting moods and engagements that offers a tactile exploration of elliptical narrative and poetic montage. Like a waking dream, what can be clearly described in words is less significant than what can be felt.\u201d<\/p>\n The record reference extends beyond the title. Klahr\u2019s features are structured more like albums than conventional narrative films: collections of individual pieces connected through recurring images, rhythms and moods.<\/p>\n \u201cStorytelling is only one type of audience engagement I\u2019m interested in pursuing in my collage features,\u201d he says. \u201cThe structure of a long-playing record is much more adaptable to my goal of continually shifting audience engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n That makes sequencing essential.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very challenging and time-consuming process,\u201d Klahr says. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s the final stage of editing: to sequence these individual films into an order that is larger than the sum of its parts.\u201d<\/p>\n Finding that order for Fable by the Door<\/em> took nearly two years.<\/p>\n \u201cIt happened through much trial and error, and through living with different orders that I would view over and over again. I thought I had the final sequence at least twice before continuing to revise and resequence, eventually arriving at Fable by the Door<\/em>\u2019s present\u2014and hopefully final\u2014form.\u201d<\/p>\n Several films were left out, including two substantial works, one approximately 18 minutes long and the other 20. \u201cThese, I realized, belong in another section of From 45 to 33<\/em>,\u201d Klahr says.<\/p>\n The placement of the remaining films was not always obvious.<\/p>\n \u201cI had ideas about how certain films should go together which, when viewed, weren\u2019t effective. I found that there were more submerged and less obvious reasons as to how and why the films went together. This past summer, I had time to try out many orders and then create three new short films that filled in transitions between the films I already knew I wanted to include.\u201d<\/p>\n The finished\u2014or \u201chopefully final\u201d\u2014sequence begins with Three Friends of the Cold Season<\/em>. Set to three songs by Dick Connette and Last Forever, it follows three isolated men living in distinct historical periods.<\/p>\n The first is a sailor inspired by the legend of Alexander Selkirk. Stranded on an island, he must accept that he will remain there for the rest of his life. An outlaw named Lazarus then senses that his time is running out and decides that death is preferable to imprisonment. Finally, a man who abandoned his former life in his youth dreams of returning to a home preserved exactly as he remembers it, untouched by age. That return, of course, is impossible.<\/p>\n The stories never intersect, but they arrive at much the same place. Adventure has curdled into entrapment, freedom into exile, and youthful choices into irreversible consequences. Whatever paths carried these men to their separate destinations, each must ultimately face his ending alone.<\/p>\n I felt that these drifting figures suggested a kind of masculinity in crisis. They are forever in motion\u2014traveling by boat, train, plane, automobile or on foot\u2014yet it is rarely clear whether they are trying to reach something or get away.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, especially in Three Friends of the Cold Season<\/em>, we see men in crisis in three different and distinct historical eras,\u201d Klahr says. \u201cThroughout the subsequent films in the feature-length sequence, there\u2019s also a lot of travel imagery\u2014boats, trains, planes and cars. And wherever they travel, there\u2019s the duality you describe: both seeking and escaping.\u201d<\/p>\n That motion continues through the brief, silent March 20, 1960<\/em> and Rain Once Fallen Rises to Heaven Again<\/em>, with its sepia-toned images of trees and graves. They pass like fragments of memory before Railroad Bill<\/em> returns us more explicitly to trains, wandering, and the question of where, exactly, everyone is trying to go.<\/p>\n A man bearing some resemblance to Clark Kent wanders across a barren landscape toward an unknown destination. Mystifying yet hypnotic, Klahr\u2019s films do not suddenly become straightforward simply because he is working with a song. Dick Connette\u2019s cryptic lyrics summon card games, guns, railway travel and revenge. Klahr responds with comic-book fragments, playing cards, textiles and assorted objects that operate like a private set of hieroglyphics.<\/p>\n \u201cRailroad Bill<\/em> was actually created as a music video for Dick\u2019s most recent LP, Too Sad for the Public, Vol. 2: Yet and Still<\/em>, on StorySound Records,\u201d Klahr says. \u201cI\u2019m always interested in letting the lyrics guide me. I know a lot of people don\u2019t listen to, or care about, song lyrics, but I always have. I\u2019m deeply interested in the type of story compression song lyrics convey, which has inspired my own explorations of story compression in my films.\u201d<\/p>\n Connette\u2019s music also shaped Three Friends of the Cold Season<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cDick\u2019s three songs are the soundtrack to Three Friends<\/em>, and sequencing them chronologically inspired me to create that film,\u201d Klahr says. \u201cDick\u2019s music is a type of collaging that brings classic folk songs into the present. I think his process has direct connection points to the way I work with my source materials.\u201d<\/p>\n In Railroad Bill<\/em>, kings, crowns, and railway cars\u2014symbols of power and movement\u2014recur within a world that seems to be going nowhere. You can\u2019t quite piece together what the hell is happening, but the emptiness and longing are unmistakable.<\/p>\n The urge to travel surfaces in more compressed forms in the films that follow. Four Wheel Gods<\/em> presents an assortment of vintage automobiles against flashing colored backgrounds. These are sexy images: cars as life, desire, possibility, and escape. In Dilated Moment<\/em>, still images of an airplane suggest another attempt to escape\u2014or perhaps to find some kind of connection. Los Angeles, seen from above, \u201csparkles like cheap jewelry.\u201d The images hint at someone arriving, but no one appears to be waiting for him.<\/p>\n Then comes Repast<\/em>, and the texture abruptly changes. Instead of cutout animation, Klahr gives us a live-action document of a seagull devouring a dead bird beside a fountain while tourists circulate nearby. The scene is mundane and brutal at the same time. Its sudden appearance is startling precisely because of everything that has preceded it.<\/p>\n \u201cRepast<\/em> was shot in Rome,\u201d Klahr says. \u201cObviously, it is surprising when it comes up in Fable by the Door<\/em>\u2019s sequence because it\u2019s not cutout animation like everything else that has preceded it. It\u2019s a good example of the power of sequencing and the expectations that it can create.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Klahr](\"http:\/\/www.cartoonbrew.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/klahr-portrait-1-scaled.jpg\")
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